This article offers a brief comparative look at American and British jurisprudential pending selection reforms, and argues that American states could improve their appointive systems by incorporating modern personnel recruitment and hiring practices. To restore public confidence in the courts, people must believe that judges exercise legitimate authority, undistorted by personal or partisan pre...

We propose a theory of strategic voting in multi-winner elections with approval balloting: A fixed number  of candidates are to be elected; each voter votes for as many candidates as she wants; the  candidates with the most votes are elected. We assume that voter preferences are separable and that there exists a tiny probability that any vote might be misrecorded. Best responses involve votin...

In “The Logic of Campaigning”, Dean and Parikh consider a candidate making campaign statements to appeal to the voters. They model these statements as Boolean formulas over variables that represent stances on the issues, and study optimal candidate strategies under three proposed models of voter preferences based on the assignments that satisfy these formulas. We prove that voter utility evalua...

The paper analyzes under what conditions spiteful preferences are evolutionarily stable applying the indirect evolution approach. With a quadratic material payo¤ function, spiteful preferences are evolutionarily stable for a large set of parameters. It is shown that strategic substitutability or complementarity is endogenous property of the game played with evolutionarily stable preferences. It...

In this paper we explore the use of selectional preferences for detecting noncompositional verb-object combinations. To characterise the arguments in a given grammatical relationship we experiment with three models of selectional preference. Two use WordNet and one uses the entries from a distributional thesaurus as classes for representation. In previous work on selectional preference acquisit...

In decision making, negotiation, and other kinds of practical reasoning, it is necessary to model preferences over possible outcomes. Such preferences usually depend on multiple criteria. We argue that the criteria by which outcomes are evaluated should be the satisfaction of a person’s underlying interests: the more an outcome satisfies his interests, the more preferred it is. Underlying inter...

We examine racial preferences in dating. We employ a Speed Dating experiment that allows us to directly observe individual decisions and thus infer whose preferences lead to racial segregation in romantic relationships. Females exhibit stronger racial preferences than males. The richness of our data further allows us to identify many determinants of same-race preferences. Subjects’ backgrounds,...

This paper presents results from an experiment designed to study the effect of self reporting risk preferences on strategy choices made in a subsequently played 2 2  coordination game. The main finding is that the act of answering a questionnaire about one’s own risk preferences significantly alters strategic behavior. Within a best response correspondence framework, this result can be explain...

Utility is the fundamental variable thought to underlie economic choices. In particular, utility functions are believed to reflect preferences toward risk, a key decision variable in many real-life situations. To assess the validity of utility representations, it is therefore important to examine risk preferences. In turn, this approach requires formal definitions of risk. A standard approach i...

Under standard models of expected utility, preferences over stochastic events are assumed to be independent of the source of uncertainty. Thus, in decision-making, an agent should exhibit consistent preferences, regardless of whether the uncertainty derives from the unpredictability of a random process or the unpredictability of a social partner. However, when a social partner is the source of ...